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ABSTRACT
Discourse analysis has been widely applied to the study of environmental communication, highlighting how language is used to reflect and affect our attitudes towards the natural world. The potential of discourse analysis to ‘reveal’ the values that people attribute to nature has recently been recognized in the context of environmental debates. This paper takes a new cross-disciplinary approach to the analysis of evaluation, combining a discourse approach (specifically Appraisal analysis) and insights from environmental philosophy and environmental policy to address the following main questions:
(1) Which values of nature may be embedded in discourse about nature?
(2) To what extent are these values represented in people’s narratives about trees and woodland in the U.K.?
(3) What are the implications of the findings for the critical analysis of evaluative discourse?
(4) What are the implications of the findings for environmental organizations?
The analysis is applied to a sample of 514 woodland narratives collected by the U.K. charitable environmental organization Woodland Trust in 2016. The study highlights new critical perspectives that may be gained from the analysis of evaluative discourse and the importance of considering and fostering people’s affective relationship with the natural world in building a strong basis for environmental action.
Acknowledgements
This research has been conducted under the auspices of Woodland Trust and I would like to thank them for their support and essential contribution to this study in (i) supplying the data for analysis, (ii) clarifying the context in which it was collected and (iii) their willingness for the findings to be disseminated at their national events and through their publications. I am also extremely grateful to the WT members who supplied the stories in the first place and were willing for the data to be analysed and used to support WT’s environmental agenda.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The Woodland Trust, Kempton Way, Grantham, Lincolnshire NG316LL. Woodlandtrust.org.uk.
2 The Charter was commissioned by WT and designed, written out and painted by Patricia Lovett, 2017. It may be viewed at https://treecharter.uk.
3 Produced by the United Nations between 2001 and 2005, attempting to qualify all the services provided to humans by nature.
4 Information about the Charter and its aims was made available to readers in the publications. In the Winter publication of Leaf 2017, for example, readers were told that ‘they [the stories] will provide the inspiration and contents for the new Charter’.
5 The Charter of the Forest was originally sealed in England in 1217 by King Henry III, acting under the regency of William Marshall, 1st Earl of Pembroke to re-establish for free men rights of access to the royal forest that had been eroded by William the Conqueror and his heirs. It was in many ways a companion document to Magna Carta.
6 The contributors had supplied their stories with the understanding that they would be used by WT and their collaborators to produce the Charter and related research. My collaboration with WT on the analysis of the stories for the research presented here was officially endorsed by the Trust in an agreement signed on 22 December 2018.
7 Ranging from 35 to over 300 words. Two of the stories are in poetry form.
8 The examples in this section are mine.
9 In distinguishing between explicit and implicit formulations, I take a slightly wider view of explicitness than in Martin and White (Citation2005), including not only straight attribution (e.g. trees are beneficial to the planet) but also explicit evaluative representations such as Trees benefit the planet by taking up carbon dioxide (Set 1/161).
10 (1) Sustain landscapes rich in wildlife, (2) Plant for the future, (3) Celebrate the power of trees to inspire, (4) Grow forests of opportunity and innovation, (5) Protect irreplaceable trees and woods, (6) Plan greener local landscapes, (7) Recover health, hope and wellbeing with the help of trees, (8) Make trees accessible to all, (9) Combat the threats to our habitats and (10) Strengthen our landscapes with trees.
11 The Earth Charter was created by the independent Earth Charter Commission, which was convened as a follow-up to the 1992 Earth Summit in order to produce a global consensus statement of values and principles for a sustainable future. The document was developed over nearly a decade through an extensive process of international consultation, to which over five thousand people contributed. The Charter has been formally endorsed by thousands of organizations, including UNESCO and the IUCN (World Conservation Union). For more information, see www.EarthCharter.org.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Gabrina Pounds
Gabrina Pounds is Senior Lecturer in Discourse Studies at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. Her research focuses on the expression of subjectivity, attitude and emotion in news, advertising and environmental discourse and on the communication of empathy and person-centeredness in online support forums, medical consultations and other professional contexts. She has published extensively on these topics in Discourse and Society (2010), the Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice (2011), Text and Talk (2011), Applied Linguistics (2016), Discourse, Context and Media (2012 and 2018) and Communication and Medicine (2018).